From an $11.1B trade flow to two GST-active supplier candidates: building a sourcing agent with Apify MCP
A supplier search usually starts too small. You type a product into a marketplace, get a page of companies, and start opening tabs. You still do not know whether the category matters, whether the companies are distinct suppliers or duplicate product cards, or whether the registration number beside a company name is even well formed. I wanted a sourcing workflow that began with evidence and…
The sourcing workflow began with three separate Apify Actors: a trade data scraper, an IndiaMART supplier scraper, and a GST verification actor. On August 8, 2026, the complete workflow was run through the Apify MCP server, which used the public production Actors to find that India reported $11.12 billion of 2024 organic-chemical imports from China.
The trade signal was then used to discover 18 IndiaMART product rows across 10 Mumbai companies. Two of these suppliers were verified as GST-active. The separate Actors allowed the agent to decide whether to make the next call, which helped to avoid unnecessary costs. The policy used by the agent was to confirm the product, buyer, and partner countries, then call the trade data actor first.
If the category was considered material, the IndiaMART actor was called with a concrete product phrase and location. Only records with an "Active" verified registration were recommended, with all others sent to a review queue.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
